Hell Night

Almost every psycho-slasher movie features teenage girls in their underwear, or taking a shower, or having sex with full-nude backsides, while the teenage boys stay full-clothed, even during sex.  The opposite, fully-clothed girls and and nude boys, is vanishingly rare.

So Hell Night (1981) stands out as a non-heterosexist gem.  It's about some fraternity pledges, including Seth (Vincent Van Patten) and Jeff (Peter Barton), who have to spend the night in a haunted house occupied by a psycho-slasher. The girlfriends go along, too.

But the girls are fully clothed or hidden under the covers of the bed the whole time.  And Seth and Jeff spend about half the movie showering or dressed only in boxers.













But it's not just about the beefcake.  I could swear that Seth and Jeff were being presented a same-sex couple, in spite of some heterosexual dalliances.

1. When in danger, the two together as tightly as boy-girl couples in heterosexist flicks.

2. Jeff investigates a mysterious noise twice, once with girlfriend Marti (Linda Blair) clinging fearfully to his back, and then with Seth clinging to him in the exact same position.

3. Jeff escapes from the haunted house and runs into town.  When no one believes him he steals a gun, uses it to hijack a car, and rushes back to rescue -- not his girlfriend, who is already dead -- but boyfriend Seth.

4. They escape together and walk off into the sunrise together, a gay reversal of the standard "fade-out kiss."

Director Tom DeSimone got his start directing gay porn in the 1970s, so it is understandable that he might accentuate the beefcake and the bonding.

Star Wars

Like Silver Streak, Star Wars (1978) is often read as a heteronormative fable. Luke Skywalker (25-year old Mark Hamill), an innocent, sleepy-eyed young man from the provinces, becomes involved with Rebel forces struggling to defeat an evil intergalactic Empire (in 1977, code for the Soviet Union), and, inevitably, meets a Girl. Except there’s no romance with the girl – in later episodes she turns out to be his sister. And there is a romance with the handsome space cowboy Han Solo (35-year old Harrison Ford).

Han is a loner (“Solo”), traveling with no one but a hairy, six-foot tall Yeti-like creature named Chewbacca (another animal sidekick to diffuse homoerotic potential), and unwilling to investigate potential human relationships.


At first he refuses to speak directly to Luke, and when he lets down his guard sufficiently to acknowledge Luke’s existence, he calls him by the diminutive “Kid.”


We wonder what he’s afraid of, and so does the Girl, brassy Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher): “Your friend is quite a mercenary!” she snaps at Luke. “I wonder if he really cares about anything. . .or anybody!”

Han finally warms up to Luke: they fight together, rescue each other, hug; at the end of the movie, Han asks Luke to go away with him (“I could use a partner”), and, when he refuses, decides to stay with Luke. But now Luke has competition in Princess Leia, who is “infuriated by” (that is, infatuated with) Han. She manages to insert herself into every shot featuring the two together.

When they are slamming against each other in a jubilant bear-hug, she squeezes between them, so they are actually hugging her.

When Han tries to walk off with his arm around Luke, she squeezes between them again.

Even in the last scene, when Han and Luke receive medals and then turn to receive the applause of the Rebel troops, the camera pans out to present the illusion that Princess Leia is between them (she is actually standing behind them).

Director George Lucas, not well known for accentuating the homoerotic potential of his films, worked very hard to ensure that Han and Luke never connect in any substantive way. What was he afraid of?

Advise and Consent

I just saw Advise and Consent (1961), the first Hollywood movie to mention gay people openly (almost). It's about the appointment of a new Secretary of State, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda). The Senate has to vote to "consent" to the appointment.

But when evidence surfaces that Leffingwell attended meetings of the Communist party years ago, Senator Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), a young, wholesome "family man," leads a committee to refuse their "consent."  Then Anderson starts receiving telephone calls ordering him to report favorably on Leffingwell, or they will reveal an incriminating letter and photo about a long-ago romance with a man.

It's all very convoluted, with plots and subplots, schemes and counterschemes, and so many characters that you need a score card, not to mention interminable Senate roll calls.  The only interesting plot point is the parallel drawn between Leffingwell's dalliance with Communism and  Anderson's gay relationship, both "mistakes" that could ruin the men's lives.

Anderson tries to track down his ex-lover (thinking that he is the blackmailer), and finds himself in a gay bar full of pomaded, dissolute types who all leer lasciviously, ready to pounce on the straight guy.  When the bartender calls "Come on in!" in a cheery voice, we're expected to shudder in dread.  And of course, the "Hollywood queer" must always die; Anderson kills himself.

Oddly, the movie was controversial in 1961 because it was so liberal, criticizing the anti-Communist witch hunts and suggesting that married men might be "that way"!  There were several gay actors playing witch hunters, including Will Geer and Charles Laughton.

At least we get a nice beefcake shot of the hirsute Don Murray, standing in front of a mirror, confronting his demons.

Don Murray appeared in many other movies and tv series, and often found himself required to take baths or change clothes on camera.  He seems rather skinny by today's standards, but in the 1960s his lithe, firm physique was all the rage.

Paul Petersen's Family Values

I've never seen a single episode of The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966).  It was before my time,  and it hasn't been rerun often.  Apparently not a lot of people were watching in the early 1960s.  Like other nuclear family sitcoms, such as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, it barely hit the top 30, regularly being trounced by Westerns (Gunsmoke), medical dramas (Dr. Kildare), and reality tv (Candid Camera).   

But the squeaky-clean suburban sitcom left a lasting legacy: Paul Peterson, aged 13 to 21, played Donna's dreamy teenage son, Jeff.  I don't know if his character was portrayed as girl-crazy or not during the later seasons, but the teen magazines  seemed oddly obsessed with pushing him into girls' arms.

In the shirtless shots, he is almost always shown with a girl -- even if that girl is his little sister, and he's reading to her in pajamas.  What were they trying to prove?

Paul had the clean-cut handsomeness beloved in 1950s teen idols, and a dreamy voice, so he began recording songs in 1962: "Keep Your Love Locked," "Lollipops and Roses"; "She Can't Find Her Keys."   Before long he released five albums and contributed to a sixth.   His biggest hit, "My Dad," was, of course, a paeon to his real-life father, with no girls mentioned.

After Donna Reed, Paul continued to perform, acted occasionally, and published a series of novels about a macho adventurer named The Smuggler.  His most enduring legacy came in 1990, when he founded A Minor Consideration, dedicated to improving the working conditions for child actors and helping them transition to adulthood.

While no one would deny that this is a praiseworthy goal, and there are no specifically homophobic statements on his website, there is also not a word about gay child actors in a heterosexist workplace -- not one word -- and the editorials veer uncomfortably toward exclusionary family values" rhetoric.

See also: Beefcake Dads of 1950s Sitcoms

Taxi and Tony Danza

Everything WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-82) did wrong, Taxi (1978-83) did right.  It was a hip, urban workplace series, like WKRP, except that it followed the adventures of the employees at the Sunshine Cab Company in New York.

Alex (Judd Hirsch) was the only professional cabbie; the others were just driving a cab until their Big Dreams came true: Elaine (Marilu Henner), art; Tony (Tony Danza), boxing; and Bobby (Jeff Conaway), acting.  To round out the ensemble were smarmy Louie DePalma (Danny DeVito), the dispatcher, and innocent Latka Gravas (Andy Kaufman), the mechanic.

What did they do right?

1. Beefcake.  A cab company doesn't lend itself to shirtless shots, but the producers always found some way to get Tony's clothes off  -- usually at the gym or a boxing match during his off hours.

During the early 1980s, his shirtless shots became a mainstay of the teen magazines.  He also appeared in the gay magazine In Touch, though the famous nude shot is probably a fake.

2. Bonding.  Tony and Bobby became so inseparable that even teenagers in the Midwest, barely aware that gay people existed, noticed their subtext.

3. Not much homophobia.

When Elaine is stiffed by a fare, she threatens to retaliate by accusing him of attempted rape, until he announces that he's the president of the Gay Alliance.

A 1980 episode called "Elaine's Strange Triangle" sounds like it will be homophobic, but when Elaine's boyfriend gets a crush on Tony, Tony handles the "problem" with tact, nonchalance, and an utter lack of homophobic panic.  Meanwhile, Alex goes to a gay bar, and ends up teaching all of the gay men how to dance.

4. A mostly gay-friendly cast.  In spite of his pro-gay character, and his gay tv son (Danny Pintauro from Who's the Boss), Tony Danza has become quite homophobic.  Jeff Conaway and Andy Kaufman died without revealing their attitudes toward gay people publicly. But today Judd Hirsch has made pro-gay statements, and both Marilu Henner and Danny DeVito are supporters of marriage equality.

Little Nemo in Slumberland

Winsor McKay's Little Nemo (1905-1914) comes from the era when comic strips were works of art, intricately detailed and gorgeously realized. It is about a boy who visits a dreamworld every night, only to be awakened at a climactic moment, usually when he was about to be eaten or destroyed.  In early strips, his goal was to reach Dreamland, where he would become the consort of the Princess.

But soon a boy named Flip came into the picture.  The exiled son of the Sun and nephew of the Dawn, he wore worn hobo costumes and green clown makeup, and chomped on a cigar to demonstrate that he was a Lord of Misrule.  He decided that he didn't want Nemo to reach the Princess, so at climactic moments he would shout "Wake up!" or display the words "Wake up!" on his hat, and Nemo's quest for heterosexual fulfillment would be foiled for another day.

Why was Flip so obsessed with ruining Nemo's quest for the Princess?  Because he had designs on Nemo himself!  He was a trickster, a "queer" character, disrupting the presumed naturalness of the heterosexual bond.

It seemed to work.  Within a few years, the Princess was forgotten, and Nemo and Flip were constant companions, exploring little-known corners of Slumberland, diving under the ocean, taking a dirigible to Mars.

Eventually Nemo picked up the Imp, an African stereotype (though he was actually from a cannibal tribe in Slumberland), who spoke only in gibberish, but proved a brave and loyal companion.  Naturally, Flip was jealous, and the two argued and fought constantly.

The queer subtext is obvious: two boys bonding, rescuing each other, forming an emotional attachment, jealously guarding against potential interlopers, with the original heterosexual goal of the journey long forgotten.

See also: Alphonse and Gaston

Jason James Richter

Several of the boys who starred in various Neverending Stories had brief but memorable teen idol careers. Born in 1980, Jason James Richter was already famous before playing Bastian in Neverending Story III (1994) for his role as Jesse, best friend of the killer whale in Free Willy (1993).

The Free Willy franchise lasted through two sequels (1995, 1997).  Meanwhile Jason was busy in a caper movie (Cops and Robbersons,1994), a sci-fi thriller (Laserhawk, 1997), and some tv, including the teen favorite Sabrina the Teenage Witch.









With all that acting exposure, you'd expect the teen magazines to be gushing in ecstasy and filling their pages with shirtless photos, but they virtually ignored Jason -- only a few shots, none shirtless. Maybe it was because he was a little. . .um. . .chunky, not thin and androgynous or a man-mountain in training.

But most gay boys couldn't care less about a few extra pounds.  He had a nice smile, and he had lots of roles that minimized girl-craziness to emphasize platonic friendships with giant aquatic mammals and elderly Native Americans.

Jason still acts on occasion, but recently he has been concentrating on his music.  He plays bass guitar for a band called Fermata.  He is no longer chunky, but he still has a nice smile.

Stephen Dunham

Stephen Dunham has died of a heart attack at age 48.  His obituaries all talk about his work in Dag, but I knew him from the 1999-2000 tv season, when a sitcom called Oh, Grow Up appeared just after The Drew Carey Show on Wednesday nights.

That season was full of Friends rip-offs, ensembles of young, attractive people who had lousy jobs but lived in fabulous apartments and were concerned primarily with hooking up.  But, except for Will and Grace, they were all aggressively heterosexual.

Not Oh, Grow Up.

Stephen Dunham played Hunter, the "Joey" character, a promiscuous hunk who discovered that he had a teenage daughter.

David Alan Basche played Norris, the wisecracking "Chandler" character.

John Ducey played Ford, the insecure "Ross" character, recently divorced.  And recently out (photo is from Squarehippies).












There was nothing on prime time like it; a gay character who wasn't a feminine stereotype, like Will Truman, and who lived with a pair of caring heterosexual male chums (unlike Will Truman, who hung out only with straight women).

It only lasted for 13 episodes, but those episodes resolved all of the plot arcs, so it had closure, like a miniseries.  It's not available on Hulu, and it hasn't been released on DVD.

I guess you had to be there.

Jack LaLanne

During the 1960s, gay boys who were too young to go to school, or home sick, could get their beefcake quotient at noon, when The Jack LaLanne Show was on.

Born in 1914, Jack LaLanne was one of the old school of bodybuilders, hanging out on Muscle Beach with greats like Joe Gold, John Grimek, and Charles Atlas before there was such a thing as Mr. America or the International Federation of Bodybuilders.  He opened his own "health spa" in 1936, and began airing The Jack LaLanne Show in 1951 (national syndication in 1959).

It was aimed at an audience of housewives, and quite sexist, with exercises designed to not only promote fitness, but to keep the ladies "beautiful for your husband."  LaLanne never seemed to notice the queerness of a man teaching you how to accentuate your bust, firm up your butt, and create "a figure that will make men sit up and take notice."

But lots of gay kids did, and even followed his tips to become not only healthy but beautiful.











LaLanne didn't make a lot of homophobic comments during the 1960s, but during the 1970s the homophobia came out.  In 1979, he announced that he intended to parade down Hollywood Boulevard with a 350-pound barbell on his shoulders to protest "the damn queers and homos and little boy prostitutes" who had "taken over."  He never actually followed up on his protest march.

In 1979, homophobic comments didn't cause a furor, so he continued broadcasting his show until 1985, when he retired to promote his fitness books, line of juice-makers, and hate his former fans.  He died in 2011.

Paranorman

In the U.S., movies and tv programs aimed at a juvenile audience are strictly censored.  Kids never hear or see anything that suggests the existence of boys who like boys or girls who like girls.  Period. Ever.  And if a writer, actor, or director manages to squeeze in a subtle hint, the howls of outrage begin.

Even if there are no hints.  In 2006, fans of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody discovered that actor Patrick Bristow, who played restaurant maitre d' Patrick, was gay in real life.  About 50% of the posts on the Suite Life fansite screamed that he should be immediately fired, lest the world come to an end.  The other 50% were more "tolerant," stating that it was ok to hire a gay actor as long as his character was absolutely, emphatically straight.  Not one post said it would be ok to have a gay character on the program.

American movies are censored even more.  I can only remember one juvenile movie -- and I've seen lotd -- with gay characters.  In Good Boy! (2003), alien explorers masquerade as dogs and take up residence with human families.  One of the "dogs" lives with a gay male couple, who appear briefly, twice.

And that's it.

So it came as a pleasant surprise when I saw Paranorman (2012), a stop-action animated film about a boy with paranormal powers who encounters a 300-year old witch's curse and zombie Puritans.  He gathers a ragtag band of allies -- his teenage sister (Courtney), his best friend (Neil), Neil's teenage brother (Mitch), and the school bully (Alvin).

Wait -- a teenage boy and a teenage girl?  We see where this is headed! The heterosexism of the American cinema demands that every movie end with a man and a woman in love.  And Courtney begins throwing herself at the studly Mitch the moment she meets him.

But something is different about Courtney's attentions -- they are portrayed as ludicrous, desperate, at her expense, while Mitch rather pointedly ignores them.

It is not unprecedented for teenage boys in kids' movies to be oblivious to girls' advances -- they usually are too dim-witted or naive to notice, and they come around at the denouement.  But Mitch does not.  At the conclusion, in a last-ditch effort, Courtney asks him to a movie.  He consents -- as long as his boyfriend can come -- since he's a fan of chick flicks, too.  Finally defeated, Courtney gives up.

Another joke at Courtney's expense, and it comes and goes so fast, with such utter nonchalance,  that some viewers could have missed it.  But there it was -- Mitch. Boyfriend.  30,000,000 kids just learned that same-sex romance exist.

There have been screams, but fewer, and less shrill, than one would expect.  Maybe the screamers are getting tired.

By the way, there's a gay subtext, too, as Neil aggressively courts Norman, and whispers to his brother "Don't spoil this for me!  I really like him!"

Can you have a gay subtext and a gay character in the same movie?

Paranorman is #6 on the list of 10 Gay Movies I Loved

Read an interview with writer/director Chris Butler in Instinct magazine.

Phantasm

Slow, moody, but beautifully shot in and around a huge white-marble mausoleum, Phantasm (1979) begins on a depressing note: a man having sex  in a graveyard with a sinister Lady in Lavender. After flashing her breasts, the woman flashes a knife and stabs him to death. At his funeral, we meet his friends: Reggie (Reggie Bannister), a chunky nerd, bald with a pony tail, who drives an ice cream truck; and Jody (Bill Thornbury), a hard drinkin’, guitar-playin’ slacker who doesn’t seem to work, but still manages to live in a huge house with guns and stuffed carnivores, and drive a fancy “Triple Black Hemicuda Convertible."

Jody’s kid brother Mike (15-year old A. Michael Baldwin), who follows him around like a forlorn puppy dog, becomes the protagonist, sneaking into the labyrinthine mausoleum and discovering that the mortician, called only the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), has been squashing the newly-deceased into gibbering dwarfs and transporting them to another planet (I don’t know why). When corpses don’t appear quickly enough through natural causes, he is not averse to harvesting the living. For some reason, he is especially interested in Mike; he sends dwarfs, regular-sized henchmen, and flying silver golf balls to fetch him, or goes himself, either in his ordinary costume or in drag as the breast-baring Lady in Lavender. Toward the end of the movie keeps popping up at unsuspected moments to shout “Boy-y-y-y!”

The Tall Man is not the only one with an interest in Mike: the camera loves him, lingering on his face in tight closeups and constantly flashing butt and crotch shots, even though he is soft, androgynous, and amazingly girlish. Director Don Coscarelli makes increasingly desperate attempts to portray Mike as macho, making him shoot guns, cuss, drink beer, and work on cars. Two different teenage girls try to flirt with him, but he staunchly refuses to give them a second glance; when the Lady in Lavender arrives, he whispers “Don’t fear” and rushes away. Finally Coscarelli gives up and lets Mike remain that rarity in the horror genre, an (almost) openly gay protagonist.

 

Like Leif Garrett, Mike is unable to play a scene with a male actor without imbuing it with a palpably erotic yearning. Maybe the scenes with older brother Jody as the easy intimacy of siblings, but what about scenes with Reggie? Mike is constantly touching him, grabbing him, hugging him. He goes out of his way to hitch rides on the ice cream truck when he is not at all interested in ice cream. When Reggie seems dead, it is Mike, not Jody, who is disconsolate, crying “What are we gonna do without him?”

Reggie is usually oblivious to Mike’s affection, but in one very enigmatic scene near the end of the movie, they are sitting crosslegged on the living room floor, discussing a plan to fight the Tall Man. While Jody is talking in the foreground, Reggie in the background quite blatantly places his hand on Mike’s upper thigh, only an inch or two from his crotch. He squeezes for a long moment. Mike flashes a quick, dreamy smile, and Reggie takes his hand away. 

 Perhaps Reggie was “supposed to” be comforting Mike in the face of a crisis, but surely it would be more appropriate to squeeze his shoulder or arm; the upper thigh is reserved for expressions of erotic interest. Instead, they seem to be acknowledging, briefly and tentatively, a romantic undertow in their relationship. As the movie ends, Jody has died, and Reggie and Mike are planning to go away together. They stay together through three sequels, with rarely a brother or girlfriend to intrude.

A. Michael Baldwin retired from acting to pursue his studies of Eastern mysticism.  Today he teaches acting in Austin, Texas.

Buy it on Amazon

Randolph Mantooth

Randolph Mantooth has had the honor of being lambasted on both Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Talk Soup, due to his appearances in a few less-than-stellar movies.  I can still hear the fake horror in the voices of Joel and the bots as they yell "It stars Ran-dolph Man-tooth!"

But he has been a good sport, even, on occasion, joining in on the spoofing, because he know the jokes are latching onto the few rough patches in an otherwise stellar career.

Tall but not gawky, earnest without being cloying, Randolph Mantooth was born in 1945, a boomer kid of Seminole Indian ancestry.  He hit Hollywood in 1970, and played lots of earnest, taciturn characters in dramas and Westerns, before his big break.

In 1972 he was cast in the action-medical drama Emergency!, about the adventures of paramedics John Gage (Mantooth) and Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe).

The paramedic was a new profession -- in 1972 there were just 6 paramedic units in the U.S.  Emergency! was instrumental in popularizing its combination of medical drama and fire/police action.  By the time the show ended in 1979, everyone knew what a paramedic was, and thousands of kids had been inspired to study EMS (Emergency Medical Services).

Paramedics Gage and DeSoto performed their first aid so accurately that some viewers were able to save lives based on what they had learned on the show, and real-life hospitals started offering first aid and CPR programs.  Training in CPR is now commonplace for many helping professions.

With such a praiseworthy resume, Randolph Mantooth can probably take the ribbing over his few bad moves.

By the way, he also supports many gay causes.

Alias Smith and Jones

The buddy movie is a venerable American institution, about two guys, cops, detectives, or outlaws, who may enjoy the company of the other sex but live only for each other.  But it hasn't transferred to television well.  So obsessed are tv producers with promoting heterosexual romance that only a few examples of buddy tv shows can be found.

Alias Smith and Jones (1971-73) was one.

Betting on the popularity of Butch Cassdy and the Sundance Kid the year before, Alias starred Robert Redford lookalike Ben Murphy, who had been making the rounds of tv dramas, usually in roles that required his shirt to come off.  He played Kid Curry, the muscular one.

Round-faced Pete Duel was cast as Hannibal Heyes.  He had starred as Rod Taylor's buddy-boyfriend in The Hell with Heroes (1968), and he was also been making the rounds of tv dramas, as well as doing a few comedies (such as Gidget).

Outlaws trying to go straight, they criss-cross the Old West, getting involved with people's problems along the way.  Thankfully, few of those problems involved old girlfriends or current flames, and many involved rescuing each other from cliffhanging danger.

But they only filmed 18 episodes together.  On December 31, 1971, Pete Duel, who had been depressed and drinking heavily, committed suicide.

Instead of cancelling the program or giving Kid Curry a new buddy to work with, the network immediately hired Roger Davis, previously Vickie's boyfriend on Dark Shadows,  as Hannibal #2.  Gay fans were outraged -- how could they replace a boyfriend so cavalierly?

But the program managed to keep going on through the end of the 1971-72 season and halfway through the 1972-73 before being cancelled.

Tunnel in the Sky

Later in life, Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) was well known as the cranky, conservative, racist, sexist "old man" of science fiction, who wrote weird, turgid, overlong, and heterosexist novels, but between 1948 and 1963, he produced 18 juveniles, about teenage boys involved in interstellar intrigue, with same-sex bonds often intense and intimate, and hardly any heterosexual dating or romance.

Tunnel in the Sky (1955) was my favorite, perhaps because its protagonist, Rod,  never displays the slightest interest in a girl.

The plot: for a high school class in this rip-roaring frontier future. Rod and hundreds of other students are zapped through a space-portal to an alien planet for survival training: "any climate, any terrain.”
They find themselves in a tropical paradise, plagued only by bloodthirsty carnivorous rabbits.

The ten days of the test pass, and then twenty, and thirty, and no time-space portal opens to zap them home. But the castaways don't devolve into Lord of the Flies savagery; they build a no-nonsense libertarian community, Cowperstown, with farming and metallurgy and square dances every weekend. Rod is elected mayor.

Not much of gay interest so far: in fact, the first thing on everyone’s mind is marriage and children.  A former pre-law student even puts out a shingle as a divorce lawyer.

But, oddly, Rod fails to marry, or date, or even flirt. When challenged, he protests that he does indeed like girls, but heterosexual romance would compromise his effectiveness as a political leader.

Such an argument makes little sense, and is based on no real life model; in fact, few men are ever elected to high political office without sporting a wife on their arm. Perhaps Rod comes up with this lame excuse to hide his actual lack of interest in girls.

Early in the survival test, Rod briefly teams up with Jack, a student from another school. They hunt, cook, and seek shelter together, and develop a chummy friendship until Rod discovers that Jack is really Jacqueline, a girl!

It is unclear why she would need to hide her gender, since girls and boys both participate in the test. But the girl pretending to be a boy is a standard plot device.  A male friend finds “him” attractive and has a bout of homophobic panic. Then he discovers that “he” is really a “she,” that is instincts were right all along, thereby “proving” that heterosexual desire is innate and natural, foolproof even when the object is disguised.

Rod, however, does not feel confused or conflicted about his feelings for Jack. When he discovers that Jack is a girl, he is surprised but not relieved, and the two do not subsequently begin a romance. Instead, he has to defend himself from the jeers of his friends, who claim that they are so competent at their heterosexuality that they realized right away that Jack was a girl. 

Eventually the rescue portal opens, but even then, Rod does not return home to a heteronormative future.  Cowperstown is home, and he is staying put.

Heinlein no doubt omitted hetero-romance from his novels because he believed his target audience of teenage boys would not be interested.  But the gay boys who stumbled upon them twenty years later found a strong validation of the legitimacy of "not liking girls."

The Blue Hawk

What gay boy could resist buying Peter Dickinson's The Blue Hawk (1976): the cover displayed a gorgeous young man with olive skin and black curly hair, his muscles visible beneath his a blue robe.

The British edition was almost as good.



















He is Tron, a teenager of humble parentage in a nameless Egypt-like kingdom, who has been raised to become a priest.  In the midst of a turgid plot involving palace intrigues and invasions from without, Tron meets the young King, who is quite obviously taken with him, inviting him to dinner and to go hawking, and asking “where will you sleep tonight?”

Neither the King nor Tron has ever been in a non-coercive relationship, so they grope their way toward love with many hesitations and missteps.  Tron vows to “serve” the King, who obligingly sends him off on a secret mission.  He gets lost, and everyone thinks that he is dead.

When he returns, the King  comes “striding forth with outstretched arms, his whole being seeming to pulse with pleasure in the living instant,” but instead of telling Tron how much he loves him, he hides (barely) behind metaphor: he whispers that losing Tron was like “the emptiness when you lose a favorite hawk, but worse, far worse.”  His master’s pet: close, but not close enough.

When they are back in the palace, the King insists that Tron not leave his side; their arms are linked or his hand is on Tron’s shoulder or he is stroking Tron’s hair even at the most important of council meetings.  But if Tron is merely a favored pet, why does the King constantly seek his advice on complex matters of state?  On a second secret assignment, Tron is wounded, and the King rushes to his side.  But again, neither overtly declares his love:

The King came in.  He looked very tired. . .but the air around around him seemed to tingle with excitement and happiness.  He stretched his arm down in a gesture that would have become a hug of joy in their meeting if Tron had not been wounded; life and warmth seemed to flow from his fingertips.

One can admire and respect a subordinate, but one can only love an equal.  At the end of the novel, he is on his way to ask the King if they can become – not master and servant or king and faithful subject, but something else that Dickinsen does not and perhaps cannot describe, not in 1976, a same-sex love that is exclusive and permanent.

Roger Mobley: A Macho Life

In spite of a few bright spots, such as Boyne Castle, Disney movies in the 1960s were overwhelmingly heterosexist. Disney Adventure Boys -- and there was a stable of them -- offered an aggressive conflation of muscles and heterosexual ravings.

Roger Mobley had been playing boys who bond with other boys for years, notably in Fury with Bobby Diamond, when Disney hired him to become Richard Davis’s Gilded Age newspaper copyboy Gallagher in four movies: The Adventures of Gallagher (1965), The Further Adventures of Gallagher (1965), Gallagher Goes West (1966), and The Mystery of Edward Sims (1968).

The first installment stays close to the original Gilded Age Horatio Alger-style stories, granting Gallagher a homoromantic bond with Jimmy the Bootblack (Bryan Russell) and no perceptible interest in girls.

But the second eliminates the buddy-bonding and asks Gallagher to puppy-dog grin at liberated newspaperwoman Adeline Jones (Anne Francis). Adeline is eight years older than Gallagher, so nothing comes of the infatuation; Disney just wanted us to know that the infatuation exists, that the Gallagher has successfully acquired girl-craziness and abandoned “unhealthy” associations with other boys.

In Gallagher Goes West, the newsboy heads out to the archetypal Western town of Brimstone, where shootouts punctuate the sizzling afternoons and horses neigh on dirt streets.  All Western heroes need horses, so Gallagher approaches a rancher’s son, Phinn Carlson (the very cute Tim McIntire, left), to see if Dad has any for sale. Phinn agrees to show Gallagher the merchandise the next day.





Tim McIntire would soon shift from Westerns to more suggestive fare, The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) and A Boy and his Dog (1975), with Don Johnson, so we might anticipate a few smoldering looks and some suggestive grabbing as Phinn shows the greenhorn Gallagher how to tame a wild stallion.

But no: when Gallagher arrives at the Carlson ranch, Phinn has inexplicably vanished, and his teenage sister Laurie (Darlene Carr) offers to train and “tame” Gallagher. The two fall in love precisely on schedule.

Gallagher also excites the interest of the villainous Sundown Kid (Davis Weaver). As the episode begins, the two have just shared a lengthy stagecoach ride. As they say goodbye, the Kid gazes at Gallagher with lip-licking predatory lust and says“I like your style” in a hoarse voice that seems to imply rather an appreciation of physical attractiveness.

Later, after kidnapping Gallagher, the Kid cups his face in his hands, draws him close, and threatens to shoot him, but looks as if he really plans a kiss instead.

Weaver seems to have deliberately added hints of homoerotic desire to his portrayal of the Kid to underscore his aura of menace – no Disney villain of the 1960s could be really murderous, but they could be creepy, and what better way to induce shudders than to display a desire for something beyond the limits of imagination? Same-sex relationships are presented as threatening, to be spurned or abandoned. The only true, valid, and safe relationships must be with girls.

After he finished his stint for Disney, Mobley went to Viet Nam as a Green Beret. He returned to marry his high school sweetheart and become a police officer in Orange County, Texas. He recently retired after thirty years on the force. Few more macho lives exist.

The J.C. Penneys Catalog

During the 1960s, gay kids had to get their beefcake quota where they could find it, like in the J.C. Penneys, Montgomery Wards, and Sears catalogs that came in the mail several times per year.  Parents must have found it odd for kids to stray past the toy section -- and if you weren't careful, they took your interest in underwear ads to heart and bought you several new pairs for your birthday in lieu of toys.

Sometimes newspapers had adequate black-and-white drawings of men in briefs, too.

And the ads in grownups' magazines might feature a bare chest or two.

Michael Gray and Captain Marvel

Michael Gray didn't get a big teen idol treatment, maybe because he didn't sing, so there was nothing for his fans to do but wait for Saturday morning, when his live-action tv show Shazam (1974-77) came on after Land of the Lost.  It was about a teenager named Billy Batson who traveled around with an older mentor (Lee Tremayne), looking for people in trouble.  When he found some, he would say "Shazam!" and turn into the muscular superhero Captain Marvel (so all bad guys had to do was gag him, and he'd be helpless).

Wait -- a middle-aged man and a teenage boy traveling and living together?  Sounds like a homodomestic pair to me.

It was a slight, wish-fulfillment plot, similar to The Powers of Matthew Star  a few years later.  My friends and I found it too childish to watch regularly.  But to make matters worse, after a season, Shazam got all mixed up with the adventures of a miniskirted female superhero, the Mighty Isis, so you could never be sure if you would see beefcake or cheesecake.

But at least Michael Gray was cute, in an androgynous teen idol way, and his alter ego, Captain Marvel, (Jackson Bostwick, John Davey) had muscles in all the right places.













Shazam marked the beginning and the end of Michael Gray's fame, but he's doing well in his second career as a florist.

Animal House

Today the anarchic campus comedy Animal House (1978) seems impossibly homophobic: there are discussions of "closet cases"; characters call each other "fruit" (for wearing a beanie), "homo" (for refusing to sexually assault an unconscious girl), and "faggot" (for falling down).  Apparently they find nothing more disgusting than a gay person.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Two of the writers, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller, came directly from the staff of National Lampoon, a magazine well known for its homophobic humor, and four actors were solicited from Saturday Night Live, the most homophobic program on television during the period (only John Belushi agreed).

What joy could gay teenagers in the 1970s possibly find in watching homophobes seduce every woman in sight?  

1. There is a TON of beefcake.  The Delta House fratboys are toga-clad, toned, taunt, and tanned almost constantly.  Boon (Peter Riegert) has a stunning shirtless scene.  The rival frat, including Kevin Bacon, have an underwear-clad hazing ritual that is not to be missed.

2. Both Peter Riegert and Tom Hulce, who played Pinto, are reputedly gay.

3. In spite of the endless scenes of bedding and gazing at girls, Animal House is about buddy-bonding.  Two of the fratboys, nerdish Hoover (James Widdoes), and leather-clad anarchic D-Day (Bruce McGill), never display heterosexual interest at all.  The others treat the quest for heterosexual sex as a game, something to talk about later, during their important lives with their friends.  Only Boon has a girlfriend, Katy (Karen Allen), who is constantly reprimanding him for ignoring her in favor of his male friends.

In the grammar of the teen anarchy film, same-sex relationships must end when the rowdy frat boys graduate and accede to their heterosexual destiny, marrying and fathering children. Here, however, the concluding “where are they now” series of freeze shots mostly  skips heterosexual performance – in favor of discussions of their careers: Hoover is a district attorney, Bluto a senator, Flounder a sensitivity trainer, and Otter a gynecologist, transferring his interest in the female form from the personal to the professional, out of the bedroom and into the clinic. In the end heterosexual “destiny” fails to claim them.

Star Man's Son

Andre Norton lived for almost 100 years (1912-2005), and published over 100 science fiction novels, many with gay content.  I stumbled upon her Star Man's Son (1952) in 1978, during my freshman year in college:

 A new edition came out that made the post-Apocalyptic youth (named Fors) look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and his telepathic mutant lynx as big as a tiger.  The 1952 and 1968 editions, with a different name, make him smaller but still buffed, and the cat a kitten.

Three hundred years after a nuclear holocaust destroyed civilization, the young hard-bodied Fors of the barbaric Eyrie tribe is exploring one of the dead cities. He observes a man from a strange tribe, with an appearance that is new and obviously pleasing: “His wide-shouldered, muscular bronze body was bare to the waist and at least five shades darker than the most deeply tanned of the Eyrie men.”

Arskane is singing, and his song “affected Fors queerly, sending an odd shiver up his backbone.”

The stranger is attacked by Beast Things (mutated rats), captured and dragged off, and although they have never met or spoken, Fors endures two days of hardship and incredible danger to rescue him. 

 He drags the unconscious and injured Arskane up from a pit lined with poisoned spikes (“his big body was flaccid,” Norton helpfully tells us), carries him to an abandoned building, and spends four days nursing him back to health. 

 Eventually, when Arskane is feeling better and his big body is no longer flaccid, Fors suggests that they return to his home in the Eyrie, for the time being anyway. Arskane jumps at the idea of the two of them staying together, but suggests that Fors’ suspicious tribal elders might have trouble accepting a dark-skinned stranger. They might have more luck among his tribe, the Dark People.

The journey is arduous, with many opportunities for one of the pair to be captured and the other to conduct a gallant rescue, and so many instances of touching, holding, and pulling each other close that I stopped counting. Arskane begins by calling Fors his “comrade,” then “friend,” and finally “brother.” When they arrive at the Dark People’s camp and meet with the chief, Arskane pleads the case that Fors should remain:

Arskane: [Fors] has saved my life in the City of the Beast Things, and I have named him brother.

Chief: He is not of our breed.

Arskane: He is my brother!

The chief finally relents, but Fors is surprised and not entirely pleased by Arskane’s ardor. He hadn’t planned on marrying Arskane!   Instead, he returns to the Eyrie to work on an alliance between the tribes.

Arskane accepts the rejection stoically, but with some deep unspoken hurt: he walks away “without looking back.”

In 1978, I was outraged by the ending.  When men and women meet in science fiction, they stick around.  Why do men meet men, then say goodbye and walk away?  Why do so many authors insist on telling us that same-sex relations are trivial, transitory, unrelated to the permanent social structures of kin and community?